Gliwice was also where my secondary school was where again I had no outstanding teachers. I had very correct teachers and I did learn something. But, when I look back, I see that a great disappointment for me was my teacher of Polish who should have impressed me somehow, opened my eyes to something, but that didn't happen, although he did have his own favourite [authors]. I think one of them was Maria Dąbrowska, Noce i dnie [Nights and Days] so at the time, to spite him, I didn't read it. In fact I only read Noce i dnie a few years ago. I have to say, I did find it interesting but not back then. What was interesting was that after October – and this went on for several years – there was a huge influx of Western literature. Suddenly, Kafka appeared and TS Eliot and Faulkner and Hemingway and Thomas Mann, Rilke. And so a secondary school pupil who, like me, already suspected that books contained all manner of wonders, will of course immerse himself in... someone like Dąbrowska seemed to be a decent Polish author, whereas the genius was Kafka. I'd already had a Kafka period, a lot of my contemporaries were experiencing Kafka's writing as an absolute revelation: incisive, allegorical writing, uniquely original. But it wasn't just Kafka – there was a whole host of Western literature. At the time, there was this anecdote that some young people in East Germany, in the GDR, were learning Polish so they could read Kafka in the Polish translation because Kafka was banned in East Germany and so they were learning Polish. Another account, which isn't an anecdote but is a confirmed fact is that young Russians were learning Polish so that they could read Polish translations of Western literature because Poland was the only country in that bloc of peoples' democracies where these books were permitted. So my secondary school years were a time when I educated myself mostly by reading all of these… well, maybe not all but I did read these new titles from the West. I was a member of the library and I read all of the books they had there including all of the great classics: Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Gombrowicz – his Ferdydurke was published in the PPR after '56. I also read the older classics, but that was mainly because of school – Kochanowski who… not Dr Kochanowski but the poet and our Romantics etc. But mainly it was my own reading which I guarded jealously. I didn't want… at the time, I believed that books were something intimate and that there was no need for others to know about what I was reading – not that I was afraid of anything because it was all allowed. These books had been published officially, but I wanted to keep them for myself.

Perhaps I also felt this way because I could foresee the conflict that was coming with my parents. As my matriculation exams drew nearer and I had to choose what I wanted to do after my exams, my parents were convinced that I would go to the polytechnic. My father was a professor there and I, of course, would go there too, following in his footsteps. I said I wouldn't, and brought on a very serious conflict with my parents which lasted for six months – a very serious battle. They sent me to have extra lessons in maths to show me that I would have no problem with maths. But I knew one thing for sure – that I was a humanities man and that these issues with the polytechnic didn't interest me at all and so I decided that no, I wouldn't give in. And I didn't.

Adam Zagajewski (b. 1945 in Lwów) is a Polish poet, novelist, translator and essayist. He was awarded the 2004 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize Lifetime Recognition Award and the 2017 Princess of Asturias Award for Literature. He is considered as one of the leading poets of the Generation of '68 or the Polish New Wave (Polish: Nowa fala) and is one of Poland's most prominent contemporary poets.

Film director and documentary maker, Andrzej Wolski has made around 40 films since 1982 for French television, the BBC, TVP and other TV networks. He specializes in portraits and in historical films. Films that he has directed or written the screenplay for include Kultura, which he co-directed with Agnieszka Holland, and KOR which presents the history of the Worker’s Defence Committee as told by its members. Andrzej Wolski has received many awards for his work, including the UNESCO Grand Prix at the Festival du Film d’Art.